CONGRESS HAS AN
OBLIGATION TO CONSIDER CAREFULLY THE 35 ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT THAT
CONGRESSMAN DENNIS KUCINICH OF OHIO HAS INTRODUCED AGAINST GEORGE W.
BUSH. Remarks on the Floor of the
Senate, June 24, 2008

Madam President,

On June 9th, Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio stood on
the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and introduced an
impeachment resolution, with 35 articles of impeachment, against George
W. Bush. It got very little attention, but it deserved the focus of the
whole nation.

By his reaction to the 2001 terrorist attacks and his
pursuit of war in Iraq, Bush has violated the constitution over and over
again – the constitution that he took a solemn oath to preserve, protect
and defend. He has also violated his oath to make sure that the laws of
the United States are faithfully executed. To put it simply, he has
committed many crimes.

I will not read all 35 of Congressman Kucinich’s
impeachment articles, or the supporting evidence he spent nearly five
hours reciting upon the floor of the House. But I would like to call
several of them to our attention.

Article 1 – Creating a secret propaganda campaign to
manufacturer a false case for war against Iraq.

Article 3 – Misleading the American people and members of
Congress to believe Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, to
manufacture a false case for war.

Article 4 – Misleading the American people and members of
Congress to believe Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States.

Article 14 – Misprision of a Felony, misuse and exposure
of classified information, and obstruction of justice in the matter of
Valerie Plame Wilson, clandestine agent of the Central Intelligence
Agency.

Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley of George
Washington University School of Law, conceded that not all of
Representative Kucinich’s 35 articles are impeachable offenses, but
said: “there are plenty of crimes there -- this is a target-rich
environment."

Unfortunately, the House, which is controlled by
Democrats, I might note, promptly buried the resolution in committee,
and the issue will probably not resurface again in this Congress. That
is a disgrace, and a danger to our form of government that the founding
fathers bequeathed to us. The issue now is not so much to remove the
President from office -- he has just several months left, and the
impeachment process would probably take at least that long anyway. The
imperative here is for someone to stand up for the rule of law, to stand
up for the Constitution and Bill of Rights, to stand up and say that we
have a system of checks and balances in this country, rather than a
system in which the executive is allowed make his own laws when it suits
his purposes, or trample on other laws when he finds them inconvenient.

As Representative Kucinich put it in an interview: "The
Bush administration has promulgated this concept of a unitary executive,
which essentially nullifies, again, the Congress of the United States.
And if the Congress goes along with that, it's essentially engaging in
self-negation. We don't have any right to destroy the Constitution any
more than the president does. And we have to look at the consequences of
our failure to act in this case."

Professor Turley agrees:
“The fact is, this is not supposed to happen the way it’s happened in
the last seven years. The framers, I think, would have been astonished
by the absolute passivity, if not the collusion of the Democrats in
protecting President Bush from impeachment,” he said.

This is not just the voice of radically partisan House
members, or the voice of legal academics. Listen to this quote:

“There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current
administration has committed war crimes.”

Those words came last week from retired U.S. Army Major
General Anthony Taguba, who investigated the original claims of detainee
abuse at Abu Graib Prison in Iraq.

Why does all this matter? Because our democracy is at
stake. When dictators rise, it is not always through a military coup.
Sometimes it is with the soft and gradual erosion of freedoms that
citizens take for granted. In her 2007 book “The End of America,” Naomi
Wolf discussed the way, historically, open societies have become closed.
She cites many examples of countries that have undergone a fascist
shift, and she documents similarities to the tactics used in this
country by the Bush Administration since 2001.

Writing of Hitler and Mussolini in the 1920s and 1930s,
she points out the following: “Each came to power legally in a working
democracy; each made use of the parliamentary system itself to subvert
and reorder the rule of law; and each of them quickly, legally,
aggregated state power overwhelmingly in his own person. Both leaders
were supported by sophisticated intellectuals and political theorists
who made the case to the people that democratic processes weakened the
nation in a time of crisis.

We have seen all of those things happen in this country
over the past seven years. She points out that the steps toward
totalitarianism are well known and well studied. After Germany and
Italy, we saw the same tactics used in Stalin’s Russia in the 1950s, in
Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s, in Communist China, and in oppressed Iron
Curtain Europe.

The United States has not gone that far down that road
yet. But we must remain vigilant. We must not lull ourselves by
thinking, It Can’t Happen Here. As Wolf also wrote in her book:

“We tend to think of American democracy as being somehow
eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults. But
the Founders would have thought we were dangerously naïve.”

I wish Congress were not so naïve and so lax in doing its
duty, and that it would take a stand against the criminal acts of this
administration.

Now Madam President, calling to mind one of the tragic
results of this administration’s lawless war in Iraq, I ask us to honor
two Pennsylvania soldiers who have given their lives there.

Private
Wesley J. Williams, 23, of Philadelphia, Pa., died March 2, 2007 in
Baghdad, of a non-combat related injury. Private Williams was assigned
to the163d Military Intelligence Battalion, 504th Military
Intelligence Brigade.

Sergeant Ashly L. Moyer, 21, of Emmaus, Pa. died March 3 2007 with two
other soldiers in Baghdad when an improvised explosive device detonated
near their vehicle. Sergeant Moyer was assigned to the 630th Military
Police Company.

They are among the 4,101 Americans killed in Iraq. Another 30,276 have
been wounded.